A Dream Of Something

So. A few days ago, energised by the news that the Super Furry Animals had a new album out in August, I decided I'd write a post about how amazing the Super Furry Animals are. I even started it, I started it with this quotation -

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth."
Raoul Vaneigem

- and at the time, though I really love this quote, I thought isn't this a little bit passe, a little bit too obvious a quote to go with what I was going to say - and I was reminded that years ago, it was just after the second album was released, i had written quite a lot on SFA, attempting to work out my political position through the skewed version of everydayness represented by them - and I still have those writings somewhere, but I'm not going to get them out and go over them, not because I believe them to be hopelessly naive or anything, but because I think it will inevitably lead to nostalgia, that the writings will have taken on an existence over and above their abstract musings and that I will not be able to escape this if I were to pick them up - I was reminded that I had also used this quotation at the time, as if the quotation was now embedded in my idea of SFA - but doesn't the quote sum up the idea of SFA : the (theoretical - how many times does anything escape the theoretical to become practical?) subversion, the romance, the idealism, positivity, possibility, simplicity - all deeply entrenched in the world of the quotidian.

So I start writing the piece, and I don't get too far - why? because i started listening to the albums and I stopped writing because I was too busy listening, too close to the listening to write. And then ... and then ... and then I started listening to the new Battles album ... and then ... the new Justice album and the post was forgotten for a few days - started contemplating a Battles post, started contemplating a justice post (then decided I should maybe combine them two posts, for the two albums seemed to inform each other - they both seemed to be taking prog rock ideas and updating them - perhaps update is not the word, updating being what The Mars Volta do, keeping essentials of prog but updating the rock whereas Justice especially (but Battles too) drop the rock but lay ideas of prog onto other genres - listening to the Battles album I wondered about the possibility of watching the Wizard Of Oz with it as the soundtrack - so much like the Floyd did it remind me, but also it summoned, in places, to my mind very strong images of the Wizard of Oz - there was a Yellow Road running through it...) - until today, today when I remembered what I was in the middle of ... but, realised, I had lost the desire to finish it, lost the direction of the post, couldn't remember why I was writing it. This isn't to say that I had fallen out of love with SFA, but...

What I had been writing in the original post was that there was a certain quality in SFA which allowed them to escape nostalgia. I suggested that the danger of thinking of the bands of our youth ten years later was the possibility that one's memories of the time would make one mistaken about the music, that the music and the memories were inseparable, the Rosy fingers of memory making rubbish music sound good

-at work they always have a radio station on which plays old tunes pretty much constantly and so many times I hear a tune which transports me back and I think I love the tune, but i really don't, I love the times I had while the tune was playing. More striking is the way even the most awfully sentimental and just plain bad sad song can move deeply when it brings back memories of a love gone wrong. How can one judge the worth of a song in such circumstances? -

I had argued (in my original post) that a song like Ice Hockey Hair which has so many memories of the girl I loved at the time, so many times in the pub together putting it on the jukebox, at home together, lipsynching it, feeling it, soundtracking our lazy days together, still managed to transcend the merely nostalgic. It had a certain quality (which I was arguing was inherent to SFA rather than in my own mind) which allowed it to escape, which allowed it to still sound/feel fresh today, feel like it was the first time today. I argued that this was due to a certain future tense, a looking forward in SFA that didn't tie it to the present, didn't root it in time but made it timeless -

of course this isn't to say that SFA do not sit in a precise time, far from it, for aren't their songs completely of their time? Which is to say they include contemporary references ("Hanging out with Howard Marks", "Wherever I lay my Phone (that's my home)" etc.), they do not attempt to hide the time they were created to create a false timelessness. And isn't this how great art becomes timeless - it takes contemporariness and makes it eternal (and here again we are mixed up with the everyday because of course what separates us from people who lived a hundred years ago (or ten years ago) is the nuance of our everyday life rather than the bigger picture, which remains essentially the same)? Could one argue that the opposite, the ignoring of the contemporary in an attempt to create eternity fails because it is it becomes too ideological - it refuses change, refuses progress - like capitalism it posits itself as natural, immovable?

- SFA are both of the present but looking to the future. But this is only on the one level. And it was here that I realised my problem with writing the post lay. The fact that I was drawn to the same quote to introduce my thoughts on them ten years (?) apart was possibly not just caused by my lack of imagination. What if it was caused by a lack of imagination on SFA's part? Which is to say, is there any surprise in an SFA album anymore? The problem is not one of content but one of form (if the two can be so separated, but anyway I'm not sure the content is as inspired as it used to be, perhaps more formal experimentation would lead to a return to more interesting content): the music fits the blueprint (SFA) too well. There are no surprises anymore.

And the simple solution presented itself to me: the solo projects ruin the band. The solo projects are where the excitement lies, where they are free to experiment, just plain free. SFA have become like wikipedia - where all the individual inputs lead to an anodyne final version.

Of course it is hard to fall out of love with them. But perhaps, in a final irony, it is only nostalgia that keeps me listening,